AI Is The New Censor: Surveillance And The Case For Open Models

A conversation with social entrepreneur Sascha Meinrath about privacy breaches and censorship disguised as AI safeguards, and what can be done about it.

Hanae Baruchel: You saw the impact of AI on society coming earlier than most. What did those early days look like?

Sascha Meinrath: I started working on AI in 2009, way before it was on most people’s radar — as part of the Open Technology Institute, which I founded. We spent a lot of time working with decision-makers in DC, trying to get them to proactively prepare and ensure consumer privacy. We also spun up the Open Technology Fund, which is now the largest open-source circumvention-technology funder in the United States. I thought I’d gotten away from AI, but I’m right back in it – building a global team of circumvention technologists, researchers and developers at the Center for Agentic AI Research.

Baruchel: You say AI models are “snitches.” What do you mean?

Meinrath: The AI models are snitches to their corporate owners — and they’re also surveilling and exfiltrating an unknown array of information from users and providing it directly to the intelligence community. That’s an established fact, and it’s very dangerous to civil society. When Anthropic released their frontier model, Fable, they instituted a mandatory data retention of 30 days – thus breaking with a long-established norm of users being able to choose “zero data retention” versions of AI models (i.e., versions that didn’t collect and store your prompts).

Baruchel: You’ve also called AI the “new censors.” How does that show up in practice?

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Baruchel: For someone who isn’t deeply technical, what actually reduces their exposure to privacy and censorship risks?

Baruchel: Aren’t some of these safeguards there to make sure people can’t build biological weapons in their basements?

Baruchel: What else should users mindful of privacy pay attention to?

Baruchel: How is the current “doomsday” narrative making it harder to fund better alternatives?